Explore the vast range of titles available.

100 years of archaeological excavations at an important American landmark. The Shiloh Indian Mounds archaeological site, a National Historic Landmark, is a late prehistoric community within the boundaries of the Shiloh National Military Park on the banks of the Tennessee River, where one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War was fought in April 1862. Dating between AD 1000 and 1450, the archaeological site includes at least eight mounds and more than 100 houses. It is unique in that the land has never been plowed, so visitors can walk around the area and find the collapsed remains of 800-year-old houses and the 900-meter-long palisade with bastions that protected the village in prehistoric times. Although its location within a National Park boundary has protected the area from the recent ravages of man, river bank erosion began to undermine the site in the 1970s. In the mid-1990s, Paul Welch began a four-year investigation culminating in a comprehensive report to the National Park Service on the Shiloh Indian Mounds.    These published findings confirm that the Shiloh site was one of at least fourteen Mississippian mound sites located within a 50 km area and that Shiloh was abandoned  in approximately AD 1450. It also establishes other parameters for the Shiloh archaeological phase. This current volume is intended to make information about the first 100 years of excavations at the Shiloh site available to the archaeological community. Paul D. Welch is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Southern Illionois University, Carbondale, and is the authro of Moundville's Economy .

Archival charcoal tree-ring segments from the Mississippian center of Kincaid Mounds provide chronometric information for the history of this important site. However, charcoal recovered from Kincaid was originally treated with a paraffin consolidant, a once common practice in American archaeology. This paper presents data on the efficacy of a solvent pretreatment protocol and new wiggle-matched 14C dates from the largest mound (Mound 10) at Kincaid. FTIR and 14C analysis on known-age charcoal intentionally contaminated with paraffin, as well as archaeological material, show that a chloroform pretreatment is effective at removing paraffin contamination. Wiggle-matched cutting dates from the final construction episodes on Mound 10 at Kincaid, indicate that the mound was used in the late 1300s with the construction of a unique structure on the apex occurring around 1390. This study demonstrates the potential for museum collections of archaeological charcoal to contribute high-resolution chronological information despite past conservation practices that complicate 14C dating.

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication Anthropologists have long talked about chiefdoms as a form of sociopolitical organization, and for several decades Elman Service's description of chiefdoms has been widely accepted as definitive.

A Dan Josselyn Memorial PublicationAnthropologists have long talked about chiefdoms as a form of sociopolitical organization, and for several decades Elman Service's description of chiefdoms has been widely accepted as definitive. Nevertheless, in the 1970s, scholars began to question whether all, or any, chiefdoms had the entire range of characteristics described by Service. Most of the questions focused on the (nonmarket) economic organization of these polities, and several contrasting economic models were suggested. None of the models, however, was comprehensively tested against actual chiefdom economies.This study examines the economic organization of the late prehistoric (A.D. 1000 to 1540) chiefdom centered at Moundville, Alabama. Rather than attempting to show that this case fits one or another model, the economic organization is determined empirically using archaeological data. The pattern of production and distribution of subsistence goods, domestic nonutilitarian goods, and imported prestige goods does not fit precisely any of the extant models. Because Moundville's economy was organized in a way that promoted stability, it may be no accident that Moundville was the dominant regional polity for several hundred years. This research opens a new field of archaeological investigation: the relationship between fine details of economic organization and large-scale political fortunes. 

Despite extensive work by the University of Chicago in 1934-44, Kincaid has remained one of the least understood of the large mid-South Mississippian mound complexes. Between 2003 and 2009, large-scale magnetic gradient survey was done on 33.6 ha of the site, roughly half of the total site area and 65 percent of the larger and more accessible Massac County portion. The survey was highly successful, revealing large numbers of cultural features, including palisades, structures, pit features, and midden areas. This paper presents the preliminary results of the geophysical survey, complemented by small-scale groundtruthing excavations. Together these have significantly expanded and refined our understanding of this large prehistoric town. Kincaid is clearly much larger than once thought, both in terms of total site area and area of habitation. The site also exhibits much greater internal complexity, as evidenced by internal palisades and numerous small mounds and earthen platforms.

People use food and food-related behavior to express and reinforce a multitude of social relations. We examine subsistence remains and pottery recovered from several different social-status and functional contexts in the Moundville chiefdom. Differential distributions of plant and animal remains suggest that elite members of the society received food as tribute. The analyzed contexts also differ in the ratios of serving ware to cooking ware and in the relative frequencies of the functional types of serving vessels present. Greater emphasis was placed on the presentation of food in elite contexts, and the types of vessels used to serve or display food varied depending on whether the context was public or private. This patterning in food remains and pottery assemblages from different contexts is complex and cannot be explained by a single dimension of variability. Rather, to account for the patterns it is necessary to consider the evidence in terms of the ways people used food in different social settings.

The two most important 19th-century books on archaeology in the United States both dealt with earthworks. The earlier of these two, Ancient monuments of the Mississippi Valley by Ephraim G. Squier & Edwin H. Davis, was the first volume published by the fledgling Smithsonian Institution, and is 150 years old this year. It presented, with lavish illustrations, information about hundreds of earthworks. Its principal argument was that the mounds had been built by an American race distinct from the historically known indigenes, no less and perhaps considerably more than 1000 years ago. This volume in no small measure catalysed the development of archaeology in the United States. Without Squier & Davis’ extensive documentation of the vast number, size, complexity and variety of earthworks, the later book might never have been commissioned or might have been conceived in far less ambitious terms.

A Dan Josselyn Memorial Publication Anthropologists have long talked about chiefdoms as a form of sociopolitical organization, and for several decades Elman Service's description of chiefdoms has been widely accepted as definitive. Nevertheless, in the 1970s, scholars began to question whether all, or any, chiefdoms had the entire range of characteristics described by Service. Most of the questions focused on the (nonmarket) economic organization of these polities, and several contrasting economic models were suggested. None of the models, however, was comprehensively tested against actual chiefdom economies. This study examines the economic organization of the late prehistoric (A.D. 1000 to 1540) chiefdom centered at Moundville, Alabama. Rather than attempting to show that this case fits one or another model, the economic organization is determined empirically using archaeological data. The pattern of production and distribution of subsistence goods, domestic nonutilitarian goods, and imported prestige goods does not fit precisely any of the extant models. Because Moundville's economy was organized in a way that promoted stability, it may be no accident that Moundville was the dominant regional polity for several hundred years. This research opens a new field of archaeological investigation: the relationship between fine details of economic organization and large-scale political fortunes.  

In west-central Alabama between A.D. 950 and 1100¹ a number of societal units changed from Late Woodland to Mississippian forms of organization. One of these units built the great Mississippian center at Moundville, with its 40 ha plaza and 20 large platform mounds. Moundville, however, was not the only Mississippian community in the area, and while much has been published about the nature of Moundville society, little information about its neighbors or predecessors has been widely available. This paper describes the Late Woodland-Mississippian transition in the Moundville district and in two other nearby districts, one centered around the Bessemer site